- Location
- Maryland
Fixed. Thank you.
Adding in those [COLOR] tags is kind of annoying.
Ship of Fools: A Taylor Varga Omake (Complete)
- Thread starter Derek M
- Start date
- Crossover
Fixed. Thank you.
Adding in those [COLOR] tags is kind of annoying.
- Location
- Maryland
Well...things are progressing in each universe. The Alien and Stargate universe are mostly fixed, and the big problem with the Skitter version of Worm is gone. The Guardians in DC were a huge part of fixing that universe -- though I'm not quite done there, that was definitely one of the WHAM! episodes. Getting the Mantle away from Harry was a huge step in the Dresden-verse (and Mab CAN remove it -- she is actually seen torturing a still-living former Winter Knight in one of the books).
More importantly, the characters are working through their arcs.
Note that the guy who turned Fred into Ilyria was Knox, and we've already seen him get Zatted into particles by Robo-Neill. I liked Amy Acker's original character and was disappointed that they ended the series before the original Fred could come back.
- Location
- Maryland
I think every multi-setting fan has at least a couple of areas that he knows nothing about. My Little Pony is one of mine. I just don't...get it. More power to you if you love it. I'm not dissing other folks' thing.
Having said that, you're more likely to see a Hellsing or Naruto crossover reference from me, and I've never even SEEN those anime nor read the manga, than you are MLP references.
- Location
- Upstate NY, USA
- Pronouns
- Fjf
Nobody mentioned Phil Coulson yet?
Jonn Wolfe
(Verified Sarcastic) (Not a Wolf)
- Location
- Beyond Sanity Since 1971
Alucard: *BLAM BLAM BLAM* "AhHAhAhaHAha!" *BLAM* "Aeuoo? Something new. How interesting!"
Saurial: "Not on the menu, sorry. Now, let's see about those chips. Yeah?"
Alucard: "A talking lizard."
Saurial: "Self evident, yes. You have a ghoul problem. So, chips?"
Neruz
Rogue Spiderbanana
- Location
- The Land of Fire and Poison
Alucard: "Excellent! Now I can cross 'meet talking lizard people' off my to-do list!"
Alucard: "Say, you don't happen to have any starfish aliens in there do you? Because that would complete my set!"
Saurial: "I have a shoggoth?"
*Tekeli-li*
Alucard: "Perrrrrrrfect."
Rajvik_wolfboy
Wolf amongst the stars.
- Location
- Florida
The bad thing is, is that even from the little bit of Helsing I have seen, this is totally and completely accurate
- Location
- USA
Is there really any difference between abridged!Alucard and the original? One place that I think ether Alucard would benefit from him taking an enthusiastic walk through the woods at night would be RIFTS. There are very few unacceptable targets even by Integra standards.
- Location
- Russia
I'm pretty sure that the only difference between abridged!Alucard and original Alucard is that the former is completely out of fucks, while the latter has one, entirely dedicated to being pompously terrifying.
Neruz
Rogue Spiderbanana
- Location
- The Land of Fire and Poison
There is a difference, but it is admittedly a much smaller difference than usual for an Abridged Series. Abridged Alucard is a bit more on the nose and flippant, canon Alucard is a bit more 'serious' drama. But unlike most Abridged Series they are basically still the same character.
Pretty sure he was still the Winter Knight at that point, and that Harry had to kill him to take the power.
- Location
- Beyond the Unknowable Veil
Fetch Mr. Freeze from DC? 😁
Edit: A thought occurs. Are they going back to Warhammer now that they have the Varga on their side? If anything can stop the eldritch abomination level monsters like the Chaos gods, he can.
Edit: A thought occurs. Are they going back to Warhammer now that they have the Varga on their side? If anything can stop the eldritch abomination level monsters like the Chaos gods, he can.
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OstermanA
(Unverified Penguin)
- Location
- $PWD
The Varga may be able to actually eat them. Also, the chaos gods are not the worst thing in the Warhammer universe. Just sayin'. >_>
- Location
- united states
You are a soul, you have a body. William was not guilty of anything Spike did, they are two separate people, and in reference to that I'd like to say William also doesn't get any credit for Spike's actions.
I feel like this story would be more interesting if any one one of these plotlines was explored in depth but the style of multiple short pieces and skipping parts in between leads to the whole thing being fan service pastiche, even if well written pastiche.
Too much altogether means no focus and too long for any plotline to come together ruining pacing.
I don't mean that offensively but constructively.
Too much altogether means no focus and too long for any plotline to come together ruining pacing.
I don't mean that offensively but constructively.
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- Location
- Home
I don't think the rest of the people would forgive her if she chose Varga, even 100 years is 100 years too long with a troll like them around.
- Location
- Maryland
One of the more troublesome philosophical aspects of souls in the BtVS universe is that it is never entirely clear how much it really constitutes, "you."
Just as an example -- a lot of post-humanist speculative fiction has discussed the concept of "you," really being the sum total of your knowledge and experiences, regardless of whether you are instantiated on wetware or computer hardware. If that's the case, then you could argue that the soul is simply a metaphysical individual backup system. When a vampire takes your body and kicks out your soul, they're effectively doxxing you and using it as a baseline for creating a new individual that combines you with the motivations of the blood demon taking up residence in your corpse. If the soul is restored, then you're basically running a backup merge and creating yet another new "individual" based upon the total experiences so far.
However, if the soul is really you in some intangible way -- like, for spiritual reasons, intelligent beings without a soul don't "count," for some reason -- then a vampire is clearly NOT you, and you're not responsible for any of its actions. That brings up questions about AI, however, and whether or not they have souls, not to mention uplifted animals (sorry, Ensign Bubbles), and beings that canonically don't have a soul like Tolkein's elves. It also begs the question of what the purpose of the soul IS, as it clearly isn't sufficient to make you a good person. Every psychopathic murderer in history has presumably had a soul. Is it simply some type of godly RFID system that tags you for the correct afterlife and makes sure you don't get sorted into the wrong bin?
Repeatedly in the series, it is stated that the vampires created by the Master (Heinrich Nest) and his children are somehow different from other vampires. Angelus, Darla, Spike and Drusila were, for whatever reason, capable of a broader range of emotions than most vampires. It is never explained exactly why that is the case, nor is it ever explained why those vampires seem to star regularly in prophecy. Why would Spike, a blood demon inhabiting the corpse of William Pratt, voluntarily go an an extremely difficult quest to return Pratt's soul, especially for something as inherently human as unrequited love? It seems like saying that a vampire that takes over your body is just a blood demon is an oversimplification. What seems to happen is that becoming a vampire creates a violently insane version of you, which makes the allocation of responsibility for your actions a bit fuzzier.
I don't know the answer to this problem, really. If I create an exact clone, then I copy my consciousness (non-destructively) over to that clone so that he is exactly the same as me, then that clone commits a crime, am I responsible for that crime? Would I have committed the same crime in the same circumstances, and it is a case of, "there but for the Grace of God go I?" We make certain exceptions of punishment for criminals who are considered not mentally fit to stand trial, but that determination is rather subjective and prone to abuse. If you become a vampire voluntarily, are you then responsible for all of its future acts, similar to how an intoxicated person is responsible for any accidents they cause while drunk?
One thing I can say is that, regardless of whether you like him as a character or not, Spike is an interesting character. Credit goes to the actors portraying Spike and Drusila, as well as the writers, for turning what was meant to be a one-shot villain into a huge part of the lore of the series. How could I not touch on that in story with so many other interesting people?
- Location
- Russia
They do, actually. Their souls are different, but they do exist, as they even have their own, unique afterlife, and they actually reincarnate.
- Location
- Somewhere, Maybe
Not quite sure you're accurate on your Legendarium there. I've always understood it to be that Tolkein's Elves do in fact have souls, it's the part of them that goes to the Halls of Mandos when they die, where they wait until they are reincarnated in a new body, like Glorfindel was.
They just can't -leave- Arda, like the souls of Men can, not without special dispensation from Above, like Luthien got.
EDIT: Imp'd. Tho, she isn't a thing yet. Hmmmm, has Imp been Imp'd?!
- Location
- Maryland
I don't take offense. I agree with you, to a point. Thank you for granting that it is well-written.
Pretty much every piece of fan fiction is fan service, to a degree. It doesn't matter whether it is deconstructionist, crack fic, trying to "fix" canon plot elements, or a complete parody mocking the source -- ultimately, the people who are going to read it and critique it and enjoy it (hopefully) or those who already have some familiarity with at least some of the referenced properties. Riding on the coat-tails of an existing popular work is kind of the point.
Part of the structure of this is heavily influenced by the structure of the original Taylor Varga. That story was basically throwing an over-powered character from a little known anime into the plot of Worm and seeing what happened. Now, Worm, for all its popularity, is a depressing story that is pretty much predicated on every throw of the dice coming up a critical failure, while protagonists wander around tossing the idiot ball back and forth. Luna Varga, on the other hand, was pretty much a textbook fantasy story with Godzilla thrown in, and it only lasted four episodes. Neither are great works in the Wuthering Heights sense. That kind of sets the baseline for mpPi's story fairly low, in a way, and he's written a highly entertaining exploration of the characters in a way that is very much fan service and very much wonderful, in my (and a lot of people's) opinions.
As an omake writer, I'm taking that premise and throwing in a mix of some of my favorite fictional universes. The plus to that is that I can explore a whole bunch of different characters that are interesting to me. The minus is that now, instead of simply following the posts of canon for the Worm-verse, I have to track the plots for many different stories, and interweave them in an understandable way. That inevitably means that individual plots will slow down. You may have noticed that I try to cover multiple universes in each chapter. That is deliberate. The intent is that we see that the plans of the Family are advancing on many fronts simultaneously. I find this to be typical of large fics involving multiple cross-overs, and if you don't like that aspect -- well, to an extent it was inevitable. In order to avoid it, I would have had to focus on a very limited set of characters or a single character and tell their stories as they navigated the multiverse, which is what Heinlein does in his Gay Deciever novels, for example. In that case, it is no longer a massive cross-over so much as it is an incredible journey story a la the Illiad.
So, to sum up, your criticisms are perfectly valid. The reasons for those elements are a combination of the source material and the nature of the fic as a massive cross-over, with all of the benefits and faults of that style of fic. It is very much fan service for me, and hopefully for those who are enjoying the reading of it. It would definitely be a more cohesive, arguably better story if I, for example, took Skitter, Squealer, Jimmy Olsen, etc., and made them the primary antagonists and described their incredible journey through the multiverse, encountering crazy lizards and over-powered beings from all over. Note that those types of stories also have their own pitfalls, in that the authors are tempted to make their protagonists like Forest Gump, a man who is inexplicably present at every major cultural event that took place during his lifetime, and who seems to have a number of skills that would make Uber look like an amateur.
- Location
- Maryland
Ah, well -- my bad. I misremembered. Pick another random soul-less sapient from some other universe. The same questions still apply.
I'm not sure that's limited to childer of the Master. When the Scooby gang meets mirror universe Willow Angel comments that the vampire really isn't that different than the human, and the later episodes looking into the past's of Angel and Spike bear that out - as do other characters like Harmony who we see as both human and vampire. As far as I can remember the only vampire who is specifically called out as somehow more human like in their behavior is Spike.
Ace Dreamer
Verified Reality User
- Location
- Between The Unknown & The Known
Is there a reason why Squealer joins the SoF in your reference? Is that a Squealer from the same Worm-verse as Skitter?